Thursday, October 20, 2016

The Trump show is almost over ...Thanks for coming ~

Exerpts from an article by Matt Bai:
That’s a wrap, folks. Thanks for coming. You’ve been a terrific audience.

For 16 months, Donald Trump’s accidental campaign was the hottest thing on TV. Even Trump seemed surprised when his little side project, sandwiched between seasons of “The Apprentice” and premised on giving away a bunch of hats, blew up into a cultural phenomenon.

How could he have known it would be that easy to take over an entire party? I sure didn’t. Turns out the Republican Party was like “Wheel of Fortune”; people followed out of habit, but they were sick to death of the reruns.

But as Trump scowled and scoffed his way through one final debate, it was clear that his egomaniacal show had finally played itself out. After weeks of ugly disclosures and cratering polls, all that remained for Trump was to figure out some way to end the series without having to admit it was canceled.

So after railing all week against a “rigged” election, Trump pointedly refused — twice — to say he would accept the result as legitimate. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” he said instead. I guess every dying show needs its cliffhanger finale.

As the candidate himself might have put it in one of his famous tweets: Trump claiming fraud because his poll numbers are horrible! Sad!

I’ll make a rare prediction here, which is that someday in the not-so-distant future, when he feels like not enough people are paying attention to him, Trump will generate headlines by telling a reporter he never really wanted to be president, anyway. And it will be the truest thing he’s said in a while.

But what about the rest of us? What kind of shaken country will Trump leave in his tumultuous wake? How do we fix what’s broken?

A lot of Americans will vote for Trump in November in spite of his bigotry and xenophobia, not because of it. They can’t stomach Hillary Clinton, or they’re desperate to upend Washington, or they’re just diehard Republicans, and they hope — foolishly, I think — that Trump would somehow blossom into a president who’s bigger than the insecure and reckless man they watched again last night.

But that’s distinct from the much smaller universe of furious, nostalgic, culturally displaced voters who drag their kids to Trump rallies, who see themselves living in a racially defined society where white men are the oppressed class, who have no real problem with violence or misogyny or people holding signs with swastikas.

There aren’t actually more of these voters than there used to be. Contrary to liberal hysteria, Trump hasn’t managed to ignite some new White Power movement.

What he’s done, in his frenzied, yearlong effort to find love and acceptance among people with whom he really has nothing in common, is to re-legitimize attitudes that had become unacceptable in polite conversation and often career-ending in public discourse.

*He re-awakened bigotry, isolationism and racism, made misogeny fashionable and made divisive an historic political party and their supporters. He has popularized slander, evasiveness and out right lying. Has he set a precedent for future campaigns? One shudders to think.

As for Hillary Clinton, she deserves congratulations for keeping to a Sun Tzu saying: "Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself."